Les Diaboliques (1954)

Directed by Henri-Georges Clouzot

Starring Simone Signoret, Véra Clouzot

What attracted me to this movie was a review I read somewhere that called Les Diaboliques, “the greatest Alfred Hitchcock movie never made,” and wow, does it feel like one. Rumors abound that Hitchcock lost out on the right to the novel by a matter of hours. Though Clouzot lends his own directorial style and executes some truly scary and creepy moments that still hold up to scrutiny today.

A brutal headmaster of a provincial boarding school terrorizes his wife and mistress to the point where the two conspire to kill him. They drown him and dump his body in the school pool only to find the next day the body is missing! Tense days pass until signs start to point to the headmaster moving about the campus. A haunting seqeunce punctuates the climax of the film, but I’m not going to ruin it for you.

I was torn between reviewing this Clouzot film and Wages of Fear, but I’ll tackle that one later, for it warrants its own review. Much better than the Sharon Stone remake, this classic horror film is not to be missed.